WeeklyWorker

18.11.2010

Joke at your peril

Jim Moody asks if the courts have undergone a humour bypass operation

The UK bourgeois state is stupidly attacking entirely innocent expressions of humour, irony and everyday comment.

In January, trainee accountant Paul Chambers had just had a trip to Northern Ireland thwarted by snow at Doncaster’s Robin Hood airport. So he went on to Twitter saying: “Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” This led to his arrest under the provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006 - rushed onto the statute book as a result of official panic over the July 2005 London tube bombings.

In May, Chambers was found guilty of sending a menacing electronic communication under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and fined £385; as a result he has lost his accountancy job. Earlier this month his appeal against conviction was rejected at Doncaster crown court and so, in addition to the earlier fine, he now faces a much larger legal fees bill - £2,600. Nobly, actor Stephen Fry has volunteered his help, tweeting, “My offer still stands. Whatever they fine you, I’ll pay.” Apparently, even the police officer who investigated thought the message merely a “foolish comment posted on Twitter as a joke for only his close friends to see.”[1]

Indeed, those who see this as completely unwarranted have fought back using, of course, social networking. For anyone who has access to Twitter, an ‘I am Spartacus’ channel[2] has been set up, allowing users to reiterate Chambers’ original tweet and in that way evoke the Spartacus movie. Already several thousand have repeated the ‘threat’: holding up two fingers to the criminal ‘justice’ system.

Then there was the case of liberal commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.When she appeared on Radio 5 Live on November 10, she questioned whether David Cameron should speak about human rights on his trip to China. Her stated position was that no western politician who supported the war in Iraq had the moral authority to lecture either China about human rights or Iran about stoning.[3] Responding to the latter in particular - though, of course, from a rightwing perspective - Birmingham Tory councillor Gareth Compton tweeted the message, “Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan’t tell Amnesty if you don’t. It would be a blessing, really. #R5L.”

West Midlands police subsequently arrested Compton, who is a barrister, under section 127(1a) of the Communications Act 2003[4] for sending an “offensive or indecent” message and bailed him pending further inquiries. Meanwhile, Compton has been suspended from the Conservative Party. Were he to be found guilty, it is unlikely that he would be able to continue his career at the bar.

Context is everything, of course, and that of Compton’s tweet was given at its end: “#R5L”. In other words, a direct and immediate commentary on what Alibhai-Brown had just said on Radio 5 Live. How could any reasonable, let alone sane, person imagine that it is any more than a perfectly legitimate form of political comment? Merely because Compton is a Tory should not encourage us to gloat over his predicament. He should be answered politically, humorously, not dragged through the courts.

Of course, the Communications Act specifically limits freedom of speech by defining as illegal those electronic messages that may be considered “grossly offensive”, “indecent, obscene or menacing”, or even “knowingly false”. Those defining what these terms mean are, unsurprisingly, judges who are no friends of the working class, freedom ... or humour. While there have been no prosecutions under this act for “knowingly false” tweets or other electronic communications that Nick Clegg might have put out this year, it is clearly a law that can be used to impose the most draconian restrictions on what individuals may or may not say.

For many of us it is grossly offensive that bourgeois politicians defend capitalism’s depravities, torture, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and many other matters. But we hardly advocate that they should be prosecuted under the all-encompassing provisions of the Communications Act. Instead, we endeavour to have them answer before democratic opinion.

If our rulers are to have their way, ‘gross offence’ is instead, and without it needing to be spelt out, to be left entirely to them. In other words, this law aims to inhibit our ability to express ourselves. Such legislation is fundamentally inhuman and antithetical to genuine democracy. Literalism reveals not only the mindset of the bureaucrat. It is an enemy of language itself.

But freedom of speech that is in any way worthwhile has to mean the freedom to be offended and the freedom to be offensive. The cut and thrust of political debate and indeed most human discourse has room for hyperbole, metaphor, humour and much else besides that. What is this objection to being contradicted or shocked? We have surely as democrats to respect the right to disagree, and vehemently so, as occasion demands. It is illogical to expect under normal circumstances political enemies or opponents to accept what we say and vice versa.

Notes

  1. Quoted on Wired UK at www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-11/12/twitter-joke-trial-appeal-lost
  2. twitter.com/search?q=%23Iamspartacus
  3. Evan Harris, ‘Twitter jokes: free speech on trial’, November 12: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/nov/12/twitter-jokes-free-speech-on-trial
  4. 127: Improper use of public electronic communications network
    (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he - (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or (b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
    (2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he - (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false; (b) causes such a message to be sent; or (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
    (3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both” (www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127).